The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.”

Watts consistently critiques modern society’s fast-paced obsession with forward progress. Satisfaction is endlessly delayed for greater material comfort, career success, etc. Instead, Watts promotes the power of the present moment, of which the future is only a part. Endlessly striving for the future entails an absence from the full reality of the present, which is where our happiness lies.

“Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them—for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.”

Just as he consistently criticizes traditional systems of religious beliefs, Watts identifies the same patterns in political ideologies like communism and fascism. Just like religious dogmatists, ideologues use their belief systems as cowardly tools to avoid confrontation with the anxiety of existential reality.

“The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it. Religious ideas are like words—of little use, and often misleading, unless you know the concrete realities to which they refer.”

Watts often references the dichotomy between the symbol and the reality towards which the symbol points. Though truth and joy lie in reality, reality is also the source of discomfort, anxiety, and dread. Often the symbol is used to replace its referent—a process that Watts argues is the crutch religious dogmatists use to avoid the true, spiritual path.

“Surely it is old news that salvation comes only through the death of the human form of God. But it was not, perhaps, so easy to see that God’s human form is not simply the historic Christ, but also the images, ideas, and beliefs in the Absolute to which man clings in his mind.”

Watts develops a complicated theology of the symbolic meaning of Christ. The Christ figure in Christianity is the human representation of the “Absolute,” or God in human form. That Jesus Christ must be sacrificed for the possibility of salvation means that the greatest human conceptualization of divinity must be overcome for passage to the true, spiritual faith beyond concept and form.

“The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead. If, then, we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures. Without such willingness there can be no growth in the intensity of consciousness.”

Those who have been given a bad hand in life often recoil from vulnerable exposure and embrace a harder, less sensitive attitude. For Watts, this is a form of death. Pain and pleasure are part and parcel of the same openness to reality. Willingness to suffer is the precursor to spiritual growth. The Buddhists claim that life is suffering. To avoid suffering, then, is to avoid life—to die.

“If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now.”

Another aspect of Watts’s criticism of the modern, future-oriented perspective is that it creates a mental habit that detracts from the present moment. To continuously think about future pleasures or achievements is habit-forming: Even when those pleasures or achievements arrive, one is already thinking of something else. The present moment, which Watts so adamantly turns his attention toward, is stripped of its life and richness when the mind is endlessly distracted by memories and aspirations.

“We seem to be like flies caught in honey.”

For Watts, the more we struggle to escape our existential predicament, the more we are ensnared by it. We become attached to our lives, our patterns of behavior, etc., and fight to maintain them. We may love our lives, like the fly loves the honey, but the more we strive to possess it, the more we become trapped.

“The scope and purpose of science are woefully misunderstood when the universe which it describes is confused with the universe in which man lives. Science is talking about a symbol of the real universe, and this symbol has much the same use as money. It is a convenient timesaver for making practical arrangements. But when money and wealth, reality and science are confused, the symbol becomes a burden.”

Again, Watts uses the distinction between symbol and reality to criticize attachments to symbols. Since the scientific worldview is steadily becoming more socially dominant, Watts critiques its adherents the same way he criticizes religious dogmatists. Instead of following symbolic tools toward greater engagement with reality, they mistake the map for the territory, obsessing over the symbols. For Watts, science may do a good job describing material reality, but it is not ultimately real.

“It isn’t that the people who submit to this kind of thing are immoral. It isn’t that the people who provide it are wicked exploiters; most of them are of the same mind as the exploited, if only on a more expensive horse in this sorry-go-round. The real trouble is that they are all totally frustrated, for trying to please the brain is like trying to drink through your ears. Thus they are increasingly incapable of real pleasure, insensitive to the most acute and subtle joy of life which are in fact extremely common and simple.”

Modern society is fast-paced and increasingly filled with noise and distraction. Too many people are stuck in a cycle, continuously striving to entertain themselves, become successful, etc. Unlike the other animals, we lose sleep over these pursuits. We lose the present moment too. Watts claims not to cast moral judgment on this predicament, or the people involved in the knowledge that shame is not a good inducement to change.

“If we are to continue to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork.”

By the 1950s, computers have become more capable of efficient calculation than human beings. Technological progress has skyrocketed, and humans are very frequently replaced in matters of “rational abstraction” (68) by machines. Watts argues that we must reorient our ways of life so that we will not be swallowed in a technological abyss. Returning to life in the present is, for Watts, the antidote.

“The question, ‘What shall we do about it?” is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. On the other hand, doing something about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands. When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once.”

Watts introduces his emphasis on awareness by expressing the unity between understanding and action. When one understands a problem, one is aware of it in the right way. When one is properly aware of something, the right way of action is immediately clear. The problem and the solution to the problem, in Watts’s optimistic paradigm, are part and parcel of the same thing. All we need is the right attunement.

“Herein lies the crux of the matter. To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it.”

Watts’s conception of awareness indicates his vision of unity amongst all things despite their surface difference. When one faces their anxiety or insecurity, they are still separated from it, since to face anxiety is to acknowledge anxiety as outside oneself. Instead, one must inhabit insecurity. The point is not to analyze, dissect, or problematize it, but rather to realize its nature through firsthand union with it. Only then can one be aware of the truth of one’s existential situation.

“But, as a matter of fact, you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of a past experience, which is part of the present experience. When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves. There is simply experience. There is not something or someone experiencing experience!”

Here Watts bridges his critique of the future-oriented perspective with his more fundamental criticism of the illusion of the ego-self. It is in the process of separating oneself from experience that the illusion of a separate self manifests. The present experience is all there is. There is no past or future separate from the present. There is no self separate from experience. This is the fundamental thesis of Watts’s book.

“Once this is understood, it is really absurd to say that there is a choice or an alternative between these two ways of life, between resisting the stream in fruitless panic, and having one’s eyes opened to a new world, transformed, and ever new with wonder. The key is understanding. To ask how to do this, what is the technique or method, what are the steps and rules, is to miss the point utterly.”

This choice is absurd in two ways. It is self-evidently silly to choose “fruitless panic” over the awakening of the soul. In a more profound sense, though, the idea of a choice is itself an illusion. The perspective, or manner of awareness, determines the path. In other words, choice is an illusion caused by separation—to believe that there is a choice is already to be on the wrong path.

“We must repeat: memory, thought, language, and logic are essential to human life. They are one half of sanity. But a person, a society, which is only half sane is insane. To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words—to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about.”

Despite his proclivity to sweeping statements of grand import, Watts reiterates that he is not disparaging language, logic, etc. Instead, he is working on a course correction for a society that has gone too far in one direction. In fact, he believes that thought is dependent on the silence of the moment that precedes thought. The present experience and the tools of the human mind used for the future are better served when the former is given its proper role as master of the mind.

“To ask for a revelation of God’s will, and then to ‘test’ it by reference to your preconceived moral standards is to make a mockery of asking. You knew the answer already. Seeking for ‘God’ in this way is no more than asking for the stamp of absolute authority and certainty on what you believe in any case, for a guarantee that the unknown and the future will be a continuation of what you want to retain from the past—a bigger and better fortress for ‘I.’”

True revelation, for Watts, cannot be tested. It is its own appeal to truth. In this passage, Watts wants to reveal the biases of the ego toward its own preservation. The ego creates particular moral standards, which it uses for its ends, and then buttresses these standards with the image of a God that grants them certainty.

“Man has to discover that everything which he beholds in nature—the clammy foreign-feeling world of the ocean’s depths, the wastes of ice, the reptiles of the swamp, the spiders and scorpions, the deserts of lifeless planets—has its counterpart within himself. He is not, then, at one with himself until he realizes that this ‘under side’ of nature and the feelings of horror which it gives him are also ‘I.’”

In Watts’s philosophy everything is united in an undifferentiated whole. Humanity is not only united with that which it finds best or most profound, but also with that which is base or disturbing. To reject the “under side of nature” is to delude oneself. The moralizer strives to minimize the bad and maximize the good. For Watts, a true ethics must embrace everything, even that which we fear.

“At once it becomes obvious why this universe exists, why conscious beings have been produced, why sensitive organs, why space, time, and change. The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly. Obviously, it all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell.”

One of Watts’s common moves is to dismiss something as a false problem, resultant from a misguided view of reality or a flawed form of awareness. Questions regarding the meaning of life fall into this category. From the right perspective—awareness of the present moment—the question is senseless. The universe does not need a utopian future to justify itself since the present moment is enough.

“Of course it sounds as if it were the most abject fatalism to have to admit that I am what I am, and that no escape or division is possible. It seems that if I am afraid, then I am ‘stuck’ with fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it.”

Watts understands that his worldview may seem like pessimistic fatalism to those who are stuck on the treadmill of hopes and memories. His counterargument is circular, by the standards of Western academic logic: To understand his worldview, he continually reiterates, is to already experience it. When one steps into the present moment and approaches the existential dread that one most fears, that dread dissipates. In a way, Watts’s prescription is a sort of exposure therapy: The more one confronts the mortality, insecurity, and anxiety that caused so much fear, the more one realizes there never was anything to fear in the first place.

“Nothing is really more inhuman than human relations based on morals. When a man gives bread in order to be charitable, lives with a woman in order to be faithful, eats with a Negro in order to be unprejudiced, and refuses to kill in order to be peaceful, he is as cold as a clam. He does not actually see the other person. Only a little less chilly is the benevolence springing from pity, which acts to remove suffering because it finds the sight of it disgusting.”

For Watts, moral codes are filters through which one screens out the warmth and community of embedded reality. Human relations should be unmediated and based on mutual understanding, not moral transactions. One does the right thing not from knowing that is the right thing to do, but automatically, as part and parcel of the fundamental way in which one understands reality.

“On the other hand, the supernatural and absolute world consists of the mysterious reality which we have so named, classified, and divided. This is not a product of the mind. But there is no way of defining or describing what it is. At every moment we are aware of it, and it is our awareness. We feel and sense it, and it is our feeling and sensations. Yet trying to know and define it is like trying to make a knife cut itself. What is this? This is a rose. But ‘a rose’ is a noise. What is a noise? A noise is an impact of air waves on the eardrum. Then a rose is an impact of air waves on the eardrum? No, a rose is a rose…is a rose is a rose is a rose…”

Classification and objectification are useless for describing the ultimate reality, or “Absolute.” Though these may be useful tools for carving up our world into symbolic orders, they do not apply to fundamental nature. Just as a knife cannot cut itself, the reality that gives grounds to different forms cannot itself be a form.

“When you are dying and coming to life in each moment, would-be scientific predictions about what will happen after death are of little consequence. The whole glory of it is that we do not know.”

Whether they come from the scientific community or the religious establishment, predictions regarding the afterlife are irrelevant to Watts. This is because the wonder and majesty of the present world is totally engrossing. The “glory” of our ignorance about our ultimate fate comes from within the present experience: To be unconcerned with the future is half the point.

The ‘I’ was not, is not, and never will be a part of human personality. There is nothing unique, or ‘different,’ or interesting about it. On the contrary, the more human beings pursue it, the more uniform, uninteresting, and impersonal they become. The faster things move in circles, the sooner they become indistinguishable blurs. It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about ‘I.’”

Again, Watts attempts to show that, contrary to popular opinion, the less egocentric a person is, the more personality they have. For Watts, we gain ourselves when we lose ourselves in the things and people that interest us. Engagement in the present moment—its sensations, feelings, and information—is the best way to become who you are.